Withings Steel HR

The slick Withings Steel HR fitness tracker combines an analog face with a digital display and a heart rate monitor.

Fitness trackers have a tendency to look sporty, with their breathable bands, hard plastic shells, and thick bodies crammed with sensors. If you want a tracker with a more classic look that still has the benefits of modern technology, the $179.95 Withings Steel HR has a lot to offer, as long as you aren't here primarily for the namesake heart rate monitoring. Withings has done an impressive job deciding which features to include, like push notifications and a tiny LCD, and which to omit, like GPS and advanced notifications. The result is a wearable that looks highly sophisticated and is just smart enough. If having a watch that goes with business attire is more important than superb accuracy or interactive widgets, the Withings Steel HR should be on your list for consideration.

Design and Battery

The Steel HR is strikingly similar to the previous Activite Steel, but it has a digital display and an optical heart rate monitor. The high polish of its stainless steel case, especially when glinting against a black watch face, looks fashionable and stately in part because of its simplicity. The Steel HR doesn't have any excess flourishes, save for a very small "Withings" logo at the three o'clock mark. Without inspecting it closely, there's no way to tell it isn't an analog wristwatch.

Two dials appear in the face. The main one is an ordinary analog watch dial that tells the time. The second is a smaller dial that show your progress as a percent toward meeting your activity goal for the day.

A small inset LCD at the top is unnoticable when inactive. Pressing the crown makes the display light up and cycle through pertinent information, such as the date, your heart rate, calories burned, and battery level. You can customize what's shown and change the order. The display also illuminates with info when you get a call, text message, or a calendar alert on your phone.

Up close, the face itself behind the glass looks like matte cardboard. Hatch marks at every minute appear to be printed with silver ink. At a normal distance, you'd never notice. That said, it makes me wonder about the finer points of construction and whether these components will fade over time.

Thankfully, and I'm speaking largely for women here, this device is absolutely unisex. There's nothing overtly masculine or feminine about it. The size and weight are suitable for even petite wrists. It comes in three designs: a 36mm version in white or black ($179.95), and a 40mm option in black ($199.95). The larger model has an added stainless steel rim around the face with numerical minute markings. The 36mm and 40mm versions have different diameters (1.4 and 1.6 inches), wristband lengths (0.71 and 0.79 inch), and weights (1.38 and 1.73 ounces). The thickness is 0.51-inch no matter which you get, and the underside curves inward to give the illusion that's quite slender.

With wearables, weight and size matter a lot. If you compare the Steel HR with another beautiful and similar device, the Misfit Phase, the latter is way too heavy at 2.4 ounces. Withings has done a nice job of keeping its watches smaller. I'm still impressed with one of its older models, the Activite Pop, which at 1.30 ounces is ridiculously light, although that model doesn't have a heart rate monitor or inset display, and those two features alone are worth the smidgen more weight in the Steel HR.

The included strap, single clasp, is black, matte, and silicone. It's luxuriously soft and supple. I don't mind at all that it's not leather, but if you prefer to swap it, any 18mm or 20mm (for the 36mm and 40mm versions, respectively) band will do. The silicone strap is waterproof, and so is the watch, with a rating of 5ATM.

A USB cord ships with the device. A few weak magnets let it tenuously hang onto the back of the watch while it charges. Battery life is strong, though, much better than the Apple Watch, which needs to be plugged in every day. The Steel HR lasts about 25 days with so-called normal use, which is to say using workout mode here and there. Even if you work out a lot, you should still be able to get two weeks of use before having to charge it again.

Fitness Tracking and Accuracy

Designed to be worn all day and night, the Steel HR tracks general activity, sleep, heart rate, and workouts. It automatically detects sleeping, walking, running, and swimming, and you can manually track other workouts by pressing and holding the crown. If the Steel HR and companion app miscategorize an activity, you can fix it in the Withings Healthmate app.

As you walk and move throughout the day, the arm of the inset dial advances. Completing the circle means you've hit 100 percent of your goal. You can customize exactly what your goal is in the app.

The tiny display on the watch gives you important information at a glance, and I'm so happy it's there. Earlier watches from Withings didn't have any electronic display, meaning you had to rely solely on the mobile app to get any data other than the bare minimum.

I was less enthused to see my heart rate on the display in real-time because it was often wrong. The readings were significantly different from those I got using a more reliable chest strap, the Garmin HRM-Run. The Steel HR was too high by 10 to 12 beats per minute when I was sitting still. Fiddling with it on my wrist and letting the optical heart rate monitor run for 30 seconds or so usually brought the readings into line with those from the chest strap.

After a run, the Steel HR lagged behind the HRM-Run significantly during rapid heart rate change. Specifically, when I ran for one mile and then stopped abruptly, my heart rate plummeted, but the Withings Steel HR was many seconds behind in reporting the drop. During a barre workout, in between sets, it recorded my heart rate dropped to 49bpm, which is highly unlikely. And on one occasion, my average heart rate overnight was recorded as 59bpm, which sounds high seeing as my resting heart rate is lower than that.

Other sleep statistics, such as bed and wake time, were on target within an acceptable range, although I don't like that you can't fix them after the fact if they're wrong. Quiet activities late at night, such as reading or watching videos, easily confuse trackers into thinking you're already in bed. You can correct those errors by changing your sleep and wake times in Misfit's app for the Ray, Phase, and other trackers from the company, but you can't with Withings devices. The Steel HR does have a silent vibrating alarm you can set to wake you, as do the other bands I just mentioned.

Smart Features

The Steel HR has some light smartwatch features: notifications for incoming calls, messages, and calendar notifications. When your phone gets a call or message, the Steel HR vibrates slightly, and the display flashes the tiniest bit of information. When "Tim" texts me, it says, "Tim" with a text bubble icon below. You can turn off any of these notifications, but you can't enable other app notifications.

The display, small as it may be, adds a lot of value. An alternate implementation seen on the Misfit Phase is to use a pinprick of a window at the bottom of the watch face where a color appears indicating different notifications. It's not an LED. It's just a flat bit of material, and it's really hard to see.

You can add reminders to the Steel HR, like a vibrating alarm for, say, remembering to weigh yourself each morning or go for a stroll each evening, but there is no option for an idle alert. Many other fitness trackers often include an idle alerts, meaning the watch vibrates or flashes when you've been sitting still for a set number of minutes, reminding you to move.

Conclusions

Attractive and with a great balance of features, the Withings Steel HR wins on style. But if you're a stickler for accuracy, the built-in heart rate monitor will be a major disappointment, as will the inability to correct your sleep and wake times. This watch isn't great for serious activity tracking either, but it's capable at capturing basic workout data, as well as automatically detecting walks, runs, and swims. As long as you have appropriate expectations about what it can and can't do, it's a lovely timepiece and a decent fitness tracker.

Before joining PCMag.com, she was senior editor at the Association for Computing Machinery, a non-profit membership organization for computer scientists and students. She also spent five years as a writer and managing editor of Game Developer magazine, … See Full Bio